Jenny Watson, while only in her late twenties, had let her fitness lag since dropping regular morning swimming club after she started her new job in a media-buying company. It was a socially involving role but while Jenny made many new friends and was out every other night at cocktail parties and client functions, her waistline was expanding along with her responsibilities.

So she enrolled at an all-female gymnasium, paying an expensive membership fee and consulting with the facility’s personal trainer. “I wanted to avoid the meat market environment found at some co-ed gyms,” she said. “This was much more nurturing and I didn’t have to worry about what I looked like or what I wore.”

Nice idea, only Jenny didn’t go after the first month. Daylight savings had finished, it was too dark for early starts and she lacked motivation after work. Too much overtime, papers to finish, another client lunch to attend – Jenny had all the excuses.

With exercise featuring in intermittent periods during her childhood, Jenny hadn’t ever developed the ‘habit of exercise’, says fitness coach Paul Upchurch. She had lost interest in swimming laps and was looking for something which didn’t leave goggle marks and chlorinated hair.

“Once you have an exercise habit, it becomes automatic. You just go to the gym, there is no force involved.

“This normally takes three weeks of consistent effort. You can be done with a body fat reducing, muscle-building workout in just about 15-30 minutes and you start to feel so good that a positive habit develops and stamps out any internal resistance.”

In-house gyms

So when Jenny’s workplace opened up an in-house gym facility, she was one of the first to sign up for a fitness assessment and start regular weight-training sessions. Her colleagues soon followed. Within a fortnight, a growing contingent of accountants, legal officers and business developers were marching on half a dozen walker machines and working up a sweat on stationary cycling equipment, rowing machines and cross trainers.

For 45 minutes, several times a week, they could be seen tightening abdominal muscles, flexing biceps, developing strength in quads, improving bone density, rolling around on gigantic Pilates balls and returning to work feeling energized and, quite literally, ‘pumped’.

“I just couldn’t get to the gym after work,” said Jenny. “But half an hour, 45 minutes at lunch time – that I could manage.”

Boom

Workplace fitness centres like the one Jenny now attends are booming across corporate Australia. According to a recent poll by global market research Angus Reid, employee fitness centres are one of the top three amenities employees are requesting.

The motivation for implementing a fitness program varies from company to company. For some it is a way to attract the best employees and keep them, and for others it decreases health costs, improves team work and enhances well-being and motivation.

Canada Life Assurance Company was one of the first Canadian companies to conduct research on the bottom-line benefits of workplace fitness programs. A federally funded research study found that regular participants had reduced absenteeism, increased productivity, improved moral and retention. A 10-year follow up study calculated a return of $6.85 for every dollar invested.

The cumulative benefit has been estimated at $500 to $700 per worker per year, according to an article published in the February 1999 issue of the journal The Physician and Sportsmedicine -- an amount that would certainly cover the cost of an in-house wellness program.

At Melbourne Park, home of the Australian Open tennis championships, the governing body – Tennis Australia – has implemented a gym and fitness program as part of its employee benefits including tennis court hire, tennis workouts, discounts and a fully stocked gym with personal trainer on site. All for $9 a month.

Take-up rate has been spectacular and the gym is also available to outside ‘guests’ from the CBD. Personal trainer Jessy Anderson.from Trewhealth, believes people are more likely to use a gym if it is professionally resourced and supervised.

“In the early days it was a matter of, ‘here’s a gym, just use it’,” reports Jessy, who is based at the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre (MSAC).

“But if you’ve never used it before, gyms are complex and can be intimidating. You could take one look at the machines and weights and never go back again!”

First steps

Prospective gym users should always have a general health assessment and fill out a questionnaire, with heart rate and blood pressure taken as an essential first step. If there are any health issues, such as high cholesterol or existing back pain, you’ll be asked to provide a medical certificate before you go any further.

Then it’s a question of working out what you want from a gym program, such as losing weight, toning muscles or just improving your level of fitness.

The personal trainer will then tailor your program to meet your goals. Is there any health risk at all?

“The biggest risk is that it will increase your heart rate,” says Jessy. “That’s a good thing – you want to push yourself so that your heart gets used to being exerted.”

Myth busters

While the goal of many men is to bulk up, some women are anxious that they will come out looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger and burst out of their corporate suits.

It’s one of the most commonly asked questions from women wanting to add weight training to their regime.

However, women do not possess enough testosterone hormone to become huge and bulky in the same way men can. They can add firmness and strength to muscles, and have bounds of energy in the process.

When you are doing aerobics you are burning calories, but weight training gives you a faster metabolism helping you to lose weight faster and changing the shape of your body.

Another myth is that working out leads to soreness and aching muscles. This can certainly happen after the first few workouts but soreness will decrease as muscles have a memory of sorts. “It’s good to keep changing your routine every six to eight weeks,” advises Paul Upchurch. “Muscles will be more receptive to a change.”

It is also not true that only cardio exercises, such as running on a treadmill or doing an aerobics class, will burn fat cells. “Cardio is important in the process but weight training builds muscle which turns your body into a fat-burning machine. It has been estimated that muscle burns five to 20 times the calories per pound as fat.”

If you want to work on a specific area, you might build muscle in those areas but not necessarily get rid of the fat. “Fat storage in the body for most part is genetic and should be addressed with proper diet and cardio exercise,” reminds fitness coach Bill Oberding.

“When you go on one of those drastic diets you might lose the weight temporarily but your body goes into self-preservation mode and begins to store fat in undesirable places according to your genetic makeup. Now you have created a whole new set of problems because those fat pockets will be the last to come off in the natural order of things.”

One side effect of weight-training and gym work is that it will supplement any other sport or physical activity you are involved in.

Wondering why you get passed all the time on the bicycle path to work or just can’t improve your time on a 50 metre swim sprint? A few months raising leg weights can quickly build power in the legs while upper body training is fantastic for swimming.

“Gym work supports other forms of exercise you can do,” says Trewhealth’s Jessy Anderson. “It can either be the main exercise or supplement other exercise you take.”